Personalized Countdown Timers with Nifty Images

Nifty Images is a great service for creating personalized, on-the-fly images. It integrates very well with Remarkety, and lets you further customize and personalize your emails with one-to-one images.

We recommend checking out their website for some really cool demos and examples! You will need an account there to create and send the timers below.

What are Personalized Timers?

You should use personalized timers when the timer counts down to a different time for each recipient. For example, if you are using our "Personalized Coupons" feature, this means that the coupon was generated on-the-fly and thus each coupon will expire at a different time. This is different from a store-wide sale which expires at the same time for everyone - in this case, you would not need a personalized timer but a generic, preset one.

Personalized timers should only be used in automations - newsletters will all be sent at roughly the same time so you probably don't need personalized timers there, but a generic timer.

Here's an example of a personalized abandoned cart coupon timer:

How it works?

Within Nifty Images, you create an image "template" which accepts a variable on the URL. For example, you can create the template for a countdown timer. To get the timer counting down to a specific time (for example, to the coupon's expiration date), you need to send the date parameter as part of the URL. This is where Remarkety's dynamic tags and variables come in!

Step By Step - Personalized Countdown Timer for Coupons

In the Nifty Images app:

1. Create a countdown timer. Save the timer, and proceed to the "Dynamic Dates" tab.

2. Select the "Email Merge Tag" Option, and

3. Select and copy the "src" attribute of the <img> tag, right up to (and including) the ?dt= part.

 4. To create the specific date string to append to the URL, we will use Remarkety's advanced text filters and dynamic context. The coupon's expiration date is stored in the {$coupon.expiration}, so if the URL created by NiftyImages above was:

https://img1.niftyimages.com/4ya/abc/def?dt=5/13/2019

Your dynamic URL should be:

https://img1.niftyimages.com/4ya/abc/def?dt={$coupon.expiration}

In Remarkety:

5. Make sure that your campaign is configured to use a Personalized coupon. If you don't see this option, you are either creating a newsletter (which doesn't support or need personalized time-limited coupons), or your platform does not support personalized coupons.

6. In the Design tab, add an image to your template (you currently need to select a static image first, any image is OK here, it will be replaced).

7. Select the image (1), make sure to turn on "Dynamic image" (2), and paste the modified URL from above into the "Dynamic Url" text box (3). You will also likely want to turn off auto-width and set a 100% width on the image (4).

 

That's it! Go ahead and preview the timer :)

You can set this timer up as part of an A/B test to measure the actual lift created by this new sense of urgency.

 

 

 

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